


When the Woman that You Love

by sinuous_curve



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Dreams, F/F, Mindfuck, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-10
Updated: 2011-01-10
Packaged: 2017-10-14 15:24:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/150719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinuous_curve/pseuds/sinuous_curve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"Is it possible for someone else's memories to get in your head?" Ariadne asks.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Woman that You Love

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [When the Woman that You Love](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1032970) by [PrettyPenny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyPenny/pseuds/PrettyPenny)



> Written for lmeden in dream_exchange @ LJ

The first time Ariadne sees Mal in one of her own dreams, the other projections suddenly turn berserk. In the frenzy that follows, Arthur is stabbed from all sides and Eames is buried beneath a clawing mass of bodies.

Ariadne loses sight of Mal.

 

*

 

Arthur never asks what happened, though that’s likely only because they wake to the mark coming up off his hotel room bed with murder in his eyes and fists swinging.

Eames takes a punch to the eye that turns blue, then black, and finally a dark, swollen purple that stubbornly holds on to his skin for longer than a bruise should. Ariadne tackles the mark back to the bed and Arthur probably breaks his nose with the blow he levels across the mark’s face.

Then they’re running from the hotel without actually looking like they’re running. It’s walking with purpose through service staircases and out a delivery door into cold snow that bites at Ariadne’s cheeks.

*

 

The second time, Ariadne is in a red dress that dips off her shoulders and swirls around her feet. She feels like a Disney princess, uncomfortable; next to Arthur and Eames she is a little girl playing dress up and yet they still send her to crack open the safe because she is the Architect of this fantasy.

The safe is in an empty room with thick carpet underfoot that shushes pleasantly beneath Ariadne’s feet. She touches her fingers to the burnished silver surface; she could just twist the door away, but there’s reckless danger in attracting that much attention. Arthur taught her what Cobb never did, that when you are in someone’s mind, you are always being watched.

She turns the dial and listens closely to the muted clicks; she almost doesn’t hear footsteps behind her.

“You don’t know why this is funny,” Mal says.

Something cold and crawling winds down Ariadne’s spine, trapping her in a moment of breathless paralysis where all she can hear is the sudden thunder of her own heart roaring in her ears. It’s a long, protracted moment before she can breathe again, and turn her head.

Mal stands in a black dress, dark hair brushing her shoulders, eyes burning.

*

 

The first time Ariadne saw Mal, she learned what it felt like to have a knife slide into her stomach.

*

 

When Ariadne wakes up, she follows Arthur with Eames a step behind her from a house nestled in the California hills that belongs to a very rich, very bad man. They fly to Chicago, and she rattles off the information they were hired to steal in a small, flat little voice. She’s almost impressed that she can remember any of it.

When they’re finished, she stands on the street as twilight falls, hands pushed into her jacket pockets. Eames shifts back and forth, huffing out warm air into his cupped hands; Arthur folds his arms over his chest and keeps his expression closed.

“I think I need a break,” Ariadne says.

*

 

What she remembers most about Mal is Arthur saying, “she was lovely,” in a small, wistful voice that didn’t square with the woman Ariadne had seen. It was that hushed little word that, more than anything, made Ariadne doubt the truth of Cobb’s recollection.

*

 

She means to go back to Paris, to ask Miles whether there is any way for someone else’s memories to bleed into your own dreams, or if she’s just becoming another casualty of extraction. He had warned them all again and again that the ability to manipulate the mind didn’t mean they understood the repercussions of doing so.

But Ariadne can’t make herself buy the ticket.

Mal is Miles’s daughter, and the reason her face struck such a familiar chord. There’s a picture of her on his desk, smiling in late afternoon sunshine that makes her look made of gold and light.

So Ariadne goes back to California, because there’s an undeniable thread of Cobb’s presence and influence running through the undercurrents of her life. And because it’s his fault, she doesn’t feel the same obscure guilt in making it his problem.

*

 

The children play outside and it’s something very close déjà vu.

“It’s not possible,” Cobb says, knuckles white around a blue glass half-filled with water he forgot to hand to Ariadne. “It doesn’t work that way. It can’t.”

*

 

Because it’s not possible, Ariadne flies to Boston to meet Arthur and together they fly to Prague to meet Eames and the three of them make the last leg to Tokyo together, descended into an odd, heavy silence.

Ariadne only sleeps on the planes, when the low hum of the engines and the hush of people shifting and murmuring and typing and snoring keeps her hovering just against the edge of consciousness. If it isn’t restful, it means she isn’t dreaming and that is what she wants.

Arthur keeps himself absorbed in research, two lines drawn sharply between his brows as he concentrates on the sheaves of printed paper spread out over the tiny tray. Eames drinks obscenely expensive first class alcohol and flirts genially with the flight crew, turning his lucky poker chip over and under his fingers.

“Is that your totem?” Ariadne asks. He looks at her for a long, appraising second, then quirks his mouth into a smile.

“That’s a secret, isn’t it.”

*

 

Laying on a hotel bed next to a mark with blond hair that fans out over her shoulders and nails painted light, delicate purple, Ariadne closes her eyes: it isn’t possible, it isn’t possible.

Arthur slides the cannula into the back of her hand. “See you on the other side.”

*

 

The third time Ariadne sees Mal, it’s from across the lobby of a grand, shambling old theater she’d built from bits and pieces of real life and imagination. The secrets were in the play they’d just watched, a history of the terrible things a powerful man will do.

Ariadne’s standing with her back to the wall, toying her fingers in the fabric of her dress. She thinks, idly, that she ought to talk to Arthur about moving their venues away from the glitzy, because she’s getting tired of ball gowns. She looks up, tracking her eyes through the crowd of projections to Arthur and Eames and instead finds Mal standing in the middle of the room in white.

“Hello,” she says around a small, knowing smile. “Ariadne.”

It isn’t just that the projections turn brutally violent. The entire dream collapses around them.

*

 

“I need to know what’s wrong,” Arthur says.

Ariadne shakes her head. Hell if she knows.

*

 

She doesn’t know if it’s that Arthur has a talent for misplacing his faith in people who probably don’t really deserve it or if it’s that he trusts her enough to know when to say when, but he doesn’t pull her aside for a painfully awkward conversation explaining why he doesn’t want her to come along on the next job.

The three of them, Ariadne and Arthur and Eames, drive to the airport in the same cab. She sits between them and stares out the windshield. She knew there was a risk of losing herself in dreams, but she feels like she’s losing everything else along with it.

“Where are you going?” Eames asks as they stand in the security line.

Ariadne touches her hand to her chest, to the ticket back to Paris in her breast pocket.

“Home, I guess.”

*

 

That, in and of itself is something of a small lie. Paris isn’t her home, necessarily, as much as the place she stopped the longest. But it’s easier to give the a city a name it doesn’t deserve than explain to Eames’s penetrating gaze what it’s like to live unanchored and still give the impression of permanence.

When she lands, it’s a little after three in the morning and it’s quiet and dim and cold as she finds a cab to take her back to her flat. She hasn’t been there in easily six months, but Ariadne could never quite stop herself from paying the rent.

It always seemed wise to have a last hiding place to run back to, just in case.

And it’s just as cold and dark inside, but there are the skeletal remains of her things scattered around. That’s a small comfort, even if every time she closes her eyes, she sees Mal watching her.

*

 

Miles agrees to see her, because he is a good man and he recklessly and foolishly both loves and believed in all the people he teaches.

They end up at a little cafe, not the one Cobb brought into the dream that first day, but another one. The umbrella is green with little yellow stripes and the wrought iron table and chairs have been painted white. Ariadne looks into the surface of her coffee.

“I’ve been a bit worried about you,” Miles says lightly. Even though he, too, was in LA and Ariadne had thought he and Cobb liked each other. But then again, there are always undercurrents.

“I’m fine,” Ariadne says, dredging up a smile.

“What have you been doing?”

“This and that.” Not a lie, just not the truth.

Miles reaches over the little table and lays his hand over hers. Ariadne has no family; it feels imperious to assume that Miles has looked at her in the same way she secretly looked at him. He reminds her of Cobb, or what Cobb could have been.

She realizes, looking into his kind eyes that coax her to say whatever’s trapped in the bottom of her lungs, that she can’t do it to him.

*

 

Back in her flat, she sets her PASIV device on the coffee table and just looks at it.

She was surprised to find that it wasn’t nearly as impossible to get her hands on one as she’d been led to believe. Arthur had arched an eyebrow when she asked, but Ariadne had shrugged and grinned (she was so young six months ago) and said, “I like to practice.”

It’s entirely possible that Arthur should have told her there was danger even in that, but he didn’t. Perhaps it was an indulgence.

Ariadne, in either case, no longer has the will to regret or resent what should and could have been. When she dreams, and she dreams now with a vividness that frightens her, it’s always about Mal holding out her hand and Mal’s lips moving against her ear.

Deliberately, Ariadne opens the case and picks up the cannula.

*

 

What Mal asked her was, “Do you know what it is to be a lover?”

Ariadne didn’t and doesn’t understand what the means.

*

 

She opens her eyes to Cobb’s living room. To Mal’s living room. She sees the furniture and the pictures on the walls, the kitchen to her right with copper pans hanging from a rack on the ceiling. She can smell it and feel the light brush of air from an open window on her cheeks.

Mal leans against the back of the couch, smiling softly.

“This isn’t my memory,” Ariadne says. “It can’t be real.”

“There is no such thing as a real memory,” Mal says, standing and taking a step closer. “Ariadne. Chere. All memories are created.”

In the cold light of reality, Ariadne can judge even the most perfectly created simulacrum of dreams to be false. There’s always something missing, something too perfectly created in perfect worlds. A sense of scent or touch or sound.

Mal’s body radiates warmth and she smells like perfume and soap. There’s a freckle on her neck that Ariadne never noticed before. She exudes calm and she is nothing like the guilt-twisted monster Cobb called his wife.

“I don’t understand what this is,” Ariadne says.

Hands come up and slide through Ariadne’s hair and down her neck and over her shoulders. Mal has such beautiful hands and she bends and presses a kiss to Ariadne’s forehead.

“You will.”

*

 

When Ariadne opens her eyes again, she’s curled on her couch with her knees to her chest and her cheeks wet. She doesn’t make a sound, she just pulls the cannula from her hand and stares out the window until she can breathe again.

She watches dark fall over Paris and the lights of the city come up to dazzle.

*

 

She doesn’t know where Arthur and Eames are or where they were going after a stop in Mombasa to meet with Yusuf before moving toward the next job. She can’t calculate the time difference, though Ariadne is grimly, hopelessly certain she’d call even if it were some ungodly hour of the night.

Arthur answers his phone on the third ring, voice carefully neutral. “Hello?”

“Is it possible for someone else’s memories to get in your head?” she asks.

There’s a beat of silence where Arthur inhales and exhales and Ariadne becomes distantly aware of the faint roar of a city in the background, and the hushed cadences of what sounds like Eames and Yusuf chatting.

“Memory transference is possible, in very, very rare cases.” Arthur says. “You’d know that it wasn’t your memory. It wouldn’t feel like yours.”

“Okay.”

Despite the bleak feeling that somewhere her mother is rolling in her grave and clutching a hand to her breast, Ariadne hangs up without saying goodbye. She ignores when Arthur calls her back twice in five minutes. She sits on her bed and keeps her eyes closed.

*

 

The Mal she saw in Cobb’s head wasn’t Mal. She believes that, Ariadne realizes, with a certainty that governs the basic truths of her life. That wasn’t Mal.

*  
*

Ariadne spends a day roaming around Paris, with the crawling sense of looking for something wrapped around the base of her spine. She walks past the college and Miles, pausing on the steps she has walked up and down a thousand times before.

She can’t shake the feeling that this is something for her and her alone, sitting fragile between her shoulder blades.

Cobb taught her in those first days when everything was new and expansive and coalescing into a bright and terrible and beautiful understanding of what she could do. He said that there were a thousand rules of extraction that all branched from a very few basic principles.

He told her that you never went into a dream without someone with you or someone watching you. And then, of course, she found out about Mal because she saw him breaking that rule.

If he hadn’t broken it, Ariadne knows she probably wouldn’t want to.

*

 

In her apartment, she drinks a glass of wine she found hiding in the pantry. It’s neither good nor bad, just something to do to try and coax a sense of ease down her twisted nerves.

And then she lies on the couch, and slides the cannula into her hand.

*

 

The fourth time Ariadne sees Mal in her dreams (or the fifth? She can’t remember anymore) it’s in a white hotel room with broken glass on the floor and furniture upturned. Something catches right in the center of Ariadne’s chest that’s sharp and hot and hurts. She curls her hands into fists and remembers her own memories.

“Do you know what it is to be a lover yet?” Mal asks.

Ariadne turns toward the low velvet murmur of her voice. She’s sitting on the end of the bed dressed in white again, sheer white that ghosts diaphanously over her body. The hot thing in Ariadne’s chest twists enough to cave her shoulders and pull out a little cry.

“Why are you doing this?” She doesn’t mean to acknowledge the fear that’s been running around in the back of her mind; the fear that Mal is more than thought and memory could ever be. Conceivable or not, when you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be true.

“That isn’t an answer.” Mal holds out her hand. “Come here.”

There is nothing logical about crossing the floor and feeling the glass shards beneath her feet and there is less logic in placing her hand in Mal’s, but Ariadne can’t stop herself. She wishes, fiercely, that Mal had been the one to find her in Paris.

“A lover,” Mal says, pressing a kiss to Ariadne’s palm and folding her fingers over. “A lover is someone who sees the inside of you. And does not run away.”

Mal turns Ariadne’s hand over and kisses her knuckles, then looks up at her and smiles. “Soon.”

*

 

The only thing Cobb was ever brutally honest about were the obvious dangers of extraction. In eliding over certain intricacies of what it means to exist in another person’s mind, he still told her plainly that extraction was a path at the end of which lay madness. If you weren’t careful.

Ariadne has been careful and conscientious. She has kept herself grounded deeply in reality, entrenched and invested in the real people around her rather than in dreams.

It doesn’t make sense that Mal would choose her and it doesn’t make sense that she would want so badly to follow wherever Mal is promising to lead. Ariadne spends a day in the library, reading everything she can find on extraction and dream transference; it isn’t much and it isn’t helpful and none of it makes her heart stop thrumming against her ribs like it wants to escape.

*

 

Ariadne only thinks of her totem right before bed. She pulls the little chess piece from her pocket and cups the metal in her hand until it warms.

It tips over, like it should, but that doesn’t quell the growing sense in the back of her mind that reality is more porous than anyone ever taught her to believe.

*

 

It takes times for her to realize that she’s begun to rethink the problem. It’s stopped being about the lack of help and turned into the realization that no one can help her, because there’s nothing to be helped.

She thinks it was Arthur who once described minds as having different tensile strength. Most minds can bend a little, some minds can bend more, and very few can bend and twist as much as extraction requires and ever return to the shape the used to have. They break, first, and Ariadne is beginning to think that she has built too much and gone too far.

On a whim, she calls Arthur as she’s walking through the streets and crowds, cheeks pink from the cold. She hasn’t slept in two days, but the PASIV device is still on her coffee table and she knows that she has to follow.

“Who burns out fastest?” she asks.

Arthur hesitates, inhaling and exhaling, then says, “Architects, usually. There’s a greater level of investment in dreams with you. With them.”

When she hangs up, Ariadne looks to the sky and the falling snow and chuckles.

*

 

When Ariadne opens her eyes, she’s standing in the window of an apartment she doesn’t recognize, with soft morning light pouring in between gauzy curtains that flap gently in a light breeze. The wind touches her face and the bare skin of her arms that’s been warmed by the sun.

“Where am I?” she asks.

Mal comes up behind her, sliding a hand around Ariadne’s waist with their bodies pressed together along Ariadne’s back. She can feel the swell of Mal’s breasts and the warmth of her body. Mal’s breath hushes out over the shell of Ariadne’s ear. “This is my first flat, when I was a student. I was so proud of it.”

A wiser person would need to ask someone, maybe Miles, what Mal’s first place looked like. And yet Ariadne knows deep in her gut that there’s no point. Mal isn’t lying and it doesn’t make sense and it’s still very true.

“I wondered if you would come.”

“I had to know.”

Mal laughs and kisses a little piece of skin on Ariadne’s jaw. Her mouth is soft and hot and her thumb sweeps a steady path on Ariadne’s stomach. Dreams always have a quality of intensity that real life can never match, their untapped potential throbbing beneath the surface of what she sees. Ariadne feels like her nerves are being played by a master musician, like her body is humming in a pitch too high for the human ear to discern.

“Let me teach you,” Mal whispers. Her other hand slides over Ariadne’s shoulder, fingers touching lightly at the dipped neck of her shirt.

*

 

The most irreverent thing Ariadne thought, sitting and twirling the cannula between her fingers, is that someone obnoxious could make a joke about necrophilia, except memories can’t be alive or dead. They just are.

And Mal is something that fills Ariadne up until she feels like her skin is going to come undone. Beautiful and terrible and wonderful and always there when Ariadne closes her eyes.

*

 

Mal leads her to the bed and sits her down. Mal eases off Ariadne’s shirt and her jeans and tosses them aside, fingers working with an ease that should only come from a lover who has known Ariadne for years. Mal strips away her dress and stands there in the sun like something untouchable and Ariadne aches for how badly she wants.

“You never answered my question,” Mal says, kneeling between Ariadne’s legs, fingers spread open wide over Ariadne’s thighs. “About being a lover.”

Sex is one thing and Ariadne has had it and liked it, but it has never been like this before. Dream aside, mind aside, all that pushed the inconsequential back of her mind where it belongs, she has never existed in a moment where it felt like her heart and breath were both going to stop and her nerves were sending a hundred contradictory messages to all of her parts.

“I’ve never,” Ariadne says, swallowing. “I’ve never been a lover before.”

Mal kisses the inside of her right thigh, then her left, breath hot. Shivers shoot their way down Ariadne’s spine and Mal kisses her cunt through the cotton of her underwear. If this is just a dream, Ariadne chooses it, because she has to know what happens next and where Mal wants to take her.

“Let me teach you,” Mal says.

*

 

What it is is Mal’s tongue pressed against Ariadne with her fingers inside Ariadne, the rhythm of her mouth and hands against the noises Ariadne can’t quite manage to connect with herself, her tongue and lungs and teeth and lips gasping in a language that hasn’t yet been written.

Ariadne tangles her fingers in Mal’s hair, speaking with her bones and flesh because she can’t with her mouth. It’s Mal crawling up her body while she’s wet and shivering and shaking, little shocks going off at random through her oversensitive skin.

Mal kisses Ariadne like they have all the time in the world, and maybe they do. She can do the math for time dilation in dreams, calculate how long a lifetime becomes when hours can become months can become years can become eternities. Mal cups Ariadne’s breast in her hand and bites Ariadne’s bottom lip and eternity seems like the smallest blink of passing time.

“This is what it means,” Mal says, pressing their hips together. Her voice is low and roughened, lips moving against Ariadne’s jaw and neck. “To be a lover, my dear. This is what it means.”

It’s the break and shattering of universes colliding and reforming and turning themselves inside out for the moments of people breathing together in syncopation.

“Yes,” Ariadne gasps. “Yes. God”

*

 

It’s morning in the real world when Ariadne slides out of dreams and back into reality. She goes from lying with her head against Mal’s chest, listening to the memory of her heartbeat echoing to lying on her couch in Paris.

Wincing, Ariadne pushes herself up and pulls the cannula from her hand. Her skin aches slightly, because she set the time for longer than she ought to have. She doesn’t feel any guilt about that; there’s too much sitting expanding in her rib cage to worry about such a tiny rule.

Deliberately, Ariadne pushes her fingers into the tender skin on her neck and chest and shoulders, wondering if there’ll be bruises when she looks in the mirror. Wondering if it matters at all, because her skin won’t forget Mal’s mouth and teeth even if the signs of them are gone.

Ariadne pushes her hands through her hair. She doesn’t know what to do, so she stands and walks to the shower and lets the hot water pound her away.

*

 

It occurs to her, standing beneath the spray, that she feels more rested than she has in weeks, that the sense of something heavy pressing down between her shoulder blades has lifted and she can breathe again.

*

 

That afternoon she calls Arthur. He and Eames and Yusuf are in Chile, doing some job for the daughter of a man who was left in a coma after an accident that had some troubling legal implications. Ariadne listens to him rattle off the details with a smile on her face. She’s missed this, she can admit.

“I think I’m ready to come back,” she says.

“Are you sure?” Arthur’s voice never betrays much emotion when he doesn’t want it to, but she imagines she can hear the faint stirring of relief and happiness, tempered with his usual caution.

Ariadne found a bruise on her neck when she looked in the mirror and she has her own PASIV device. “I’m sure,” she says.

Who is to say what’s a dream and what’s real? And she can have them both, if she wants.

END


End file.
